by Will Jones
Sadiq Khan’s hated Ulez expansion across Greater London had no impact on air pollution, a new study by scientists at the University of Birmingham has found. The Mail has the story.
Sadiq Khan controversially expanded London’s Ultra Low Emissions Zone (Ulez) two years ago, at an estimated cost of up to £155 million.
Now, a breakthrough study suggests that fervent opposition at the time was well-judged.
Scientists at the University of Birmingham say the expansion of the Ulez in August 2023 had no significant impact on lowering air pollution.
In addition, London still faces air pollution levels well above international health-based guidelines, according to the experts.
Campaigners are now calling for Ulez to be scrapped altogether as it is saddling “Londoners with mountains of debt”.
“This is just further evidence that the Ulez expansion was about raising money rather than improving air quality,” Thomas Turrell, Transport and Environment spokesperson for City Hall Conservatives, told the Daily Mail.
“This is exactly what TfL’s own modelling showed, but yet again, Sadiq Khan is ignoring the evidence when it doesn’t suit his agenda.”
Damning figures released in 2023 showed how the Ulez expansion generated a whopping £5.3 million in its first week alone – with millions more raked in from drivers since.
Introduced in April 2019, ULEZ allows authorities to charge diesel and petrol vehicles £12.50 per day for operating in London if they are not compliant with emissions standards.
It uses a network of cameras that snap a photo of a vehicle’s plates, which searches a database to check if it is compliant, and, if not, issues a fine to the owner.
Ulez was intended to reduce vehicle emissions in some of London’s most polluted areas, but the decision to expand it to areas where traffic is less dense two years ago proved controversial.
It means the Ulez now applies to all 32 London boroughs, covering over 1,500 square kilometres (580 sq miles) and around nine million people. The zone pushes right up to the borders of surrounding counties including Kent, Surrey, Essex and Hertfordshire.
The new University of Birmingham study focused on two harmful pollutants called nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and PM2.5 – which refers to fine particles with a diameter 2.5 micrometers or less, invisible to the naked eye. …
According to the findings, there was a 19.6% reduction in NO2 at roadside sites in central London within three months of Ulez originally being introduced in 2019.
Meanwhile, nitrogen oxides (NOx) – the wider group of toxic gases to which NO2 belongs – fell by 28.8% in the same period for the same area.
However, no significant impact was detected on NO2 or NOx levels following the Ulez expansion in August 2023.
What’s more, PM2.5 pollution across the whole of London has not significantly fallen over the entire period – not just since 2023.
Unfortunately, NO2 and PM 2.5 (fine particles that can enter into our lungs) pollution in London remains well above guidelines from the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Worth reading in full.
Seems like a good moment to remind ourselves of the historical picture here:
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As the Central Scrutiniser said: “We tried to warn him…”
But Ulez is nothing compared to the coming storm:
Sadiq Khan accused of ‘facilitating cover-up’ of grooming gangs – Daily Mail
With Khan it’s all anti vehicle and at a huge cost to ordinary Londoners, too. Ulez cameras can, if needed, facilitate a pay per mile scheme – they will desperately need to replace those declining fuel duties.
Oxford Street is not immune. Once a premier shopping area its decline over the years has been sad to see. And Khan wants to make it worse. Promoting business and access? No. Not a chance.
Sadiq Khan wants to use new planning powers to take control of the central London area away from Westminster City Council in order for the street to be pedestrianised. – BBC
Khan knew full well that Ulez expansion would achieve nothing whatsoever other than revenue and taking some perfectly serviceable cars off the roads. One can only hope he gets what’s coming to him.
He is a judas goat for the satanic cabal, as is starmer, fishing before him who made £500m on the blood clotting, turbo cancer inducing moderna so called mrna vaccine. Put Charles in that lot as well
Weird
I meant rishi not bloody fishing
This people need putting on public trial. Bring back madame guillotine and I’ll happily take up knitting
I appreciate that sentiment, really I do. However, we know how the dictatorship works. It’s sole purpose is preserve the status quo at the very least, increasing its powers where possible. Any Suffragette were they alive today could tell you it hasn’t changed one iota. Parliament does not hand out freedoms, they have to be fought for and won.
One only need see the farcical Grooming Gangs Inquiry to see how they operate. Yes, despite documentary evidence to back them up, Jess Phillips called the victims liars in Parliament. Exactly what they were labelled all along.
But then Jess is going to lose her seat at the next election to the sectarian muslim vote.
The pillory works well too
Horses for ‘quartering too. And just think, it’s “green.”
Fact
It would be great if the grooming gangs could be trained as hair stylists.
It’s actually common practice for them to open up hairdresser shops to launder money.
The child rape, or as idiots use to say “grooming”(the same idiots who after the exposure claim its just Pakistanis,while in fact literally all other groups participate once they reach a certain population – in Cologne Germany 90% of all rapes used to be committed by Turks alreadyback in the 90ies)
will then happen in those shops.
“Grooming Gangs” sounds like a herd of Valets wreaking havoc with their clothing brushes
And Khan is just the prototype for Mamdani as the probable mayor for NYC.
If Madmami (Mamdani) wins the financial district (aka Wall Street…the Stock Market) COULD be in SERIOUS trouble.
No worries, according to leftardy logic it has to be expanded even further to show even less effect…but hey guess that they don’t care a bit about facts or reality.
Sounds like Canada …..
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/10/breaking-president-trump-terminates-all-trade-negotiations-canada/
edited Regan speech on trade …. …
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/115426967566430347
Oh Canada, you my 2.home and screwed up land…lalala…when will you ever learn?
At first review this might seem like an angered response to a fabrication by the Canadian government of Prime Minister Mark Carney. However, there is much more to this background story as CTH readers are well aware.
First, rather than make any substantive policy changes, Canada is organizing a new trade relationship with China as an offset to the trade conflict with President Trump. {GO DEEP} This will make Canada a dumping ground for cheap Chinese goods, which then becomes a problem for the U.S.
Second, President Trump has stated his intention to dissolve the North American USMCA trade deal in favor of two separate bilateral trade agreements between the U.S and Mexico and the U.S. and Canada. Again, without the U.S. economy as a subsidy for their policy, a disconnect will make Canada very vulnerable to China and Europe. {GO DEEP}
Yes
I was born and bred in London and remember how polluted it used to be. In fact I recall the December 62 smog that followed the Cuban missile crisis and heralded that great winter of 62/63. So to say London is now polluted is farcical and that globalist imp khunt knows it. The congestion charge was never about congestion as ulez isn’t about pollution. There has been one incident in all the years of the two charges where a vehicle has been stopped going into London to congest and pollute 24/7 as long as you pay. Khunt the wef demon wouldn’t bat an eyelid as long as you, no pun intended, cough up. Its a down right lie. By the way I got out and moved to the coast to escape the madness
Import the Third World…and watch the Third World take over…
I am sure there are plenty of British/Europeans who would eagerly be pursuing the same objectives as Sadiq Khan. You can see it with Brexit; we’ve largely escaped the EUs bureaucrats only to find our home-grown ones have the same impulses. In fact worse. At least the Europeans understand many of their regulations are just “serving suggestions”. We always implemented gold-plated versions.
Imagine Ed Milliband as London mayor. His family has been in the UK as long as the Khans and Belgium isn’t a third-world country.
Or do its washing…
Hotel migrants could have their clothes washed for free in a pick-up and returns service run by a Home Office-hired laundry firm.
Taxpayer-funded Clearsprings is looking for a sub-contractor to do dirty washing and sheets. They are in talks with French laundry giant Elis which already has a contract with the NHS. If a deal is reached, a trial would involve hotels in the Bristol area, it is understood. – The Sun
Exactly it isn’t about bringing the “Third World” up to First World standards, it’s about remaking the entire world as Third World Standard except for the Proprietorial Class
You are right
“International health based guidelines” were significantly tightened when it became apparent that cities like London were going to be deemed healthy under the old ones. Yet for key pollutants, a city like Kathmandu (in an enclosed mountain valley) or Mexico City (ditto) have pollution levels that are more than an order of magnitude higher and nobody does anything.
The new guidelines do not appear to have been set with any proper evidence that they will make any significant change to health outcomes compared with their predecessors. Once again, it’s models all the way down.
It is reasonably well known that one of the larger contributors to residual pollution in London is the wood burners installed because they were green (and bypassed mad energy policy.) We previously made a big effort to replace fireside gas fires central heating precisely to cut pollution. YCNMIU.
Sometimes it isn’t even that. I don’t know about this particular case; I’m going to spend some time today looking into the tightening of guidelines you mention. But I have been very sceptical of such guidelines since the dietary cholesterol scare in the late 70s. Later my attitude was cemented when one of the experts charged with recommending “safe” alcoholic intake guidelines for the UK admitted they couldn’t find any solid evidence so to discharge their brief they just picked some numbers.
Put people in charge of something and they have to show they are in charge, otherwise there’s a gap in their CV.
The other one is 5 a day fruit and veg, which excludes potatoes in the UK, just in case the plebs start counting chips and crisps in the 5.
It does not, indeed, add up. This article concentrates (no pun intended) on only one of the links in a multi-link chain of accusations – the link between ULEZ and pollutant concentrations. But to prove that reducing pollutant concentrations brings about an improvement in health is another matter; another, independent link in the required proof chain. This is just the same as with climate change, where if you want to justify CO2 restrictions, you need to prove both that CO2 emissions cause warming and that the warming they cause has bad effects overall.
In 2018, Professor Chris Griffiths published a study that “found no evidence of a reduction in the proportion of children with small lungs over this period, despite small improvements in air quality in highly polluted urban areas during the implementation of London’s LEZ.” But Shirley Rodriguez, deputy mayor of London, did not like this outcome, and pressured Professor Griffiths to change his conclusions. Which he, to his credit, refused to do.
What I think we really need is to get studies done that “get rid of the middle-man,” and trace actual health outcomes against pollution reduction policies, over a long period (since the Great Smog of London at least). That, I think, should sort the measures that have actually achieved positive results, like introducing ultra-low-sulphur diesel, from the ones like ULEZ that have simply been money-spinners for the political class.
PM2.5 is a farce. The supposed “premature deaths” are MODEL ESTIMATES and are literally as ludicrous as deaths that would supposedly happen a few DAYS earlier.
And , didn’t the EPA expose test participants to 100 times the “safe limit” of PM2.5 (without their informed consent) ?
And no adverse reactions resulted ?
The true believing zealots of the Marxist Death Cult division known as Climastrology have four main goals they share with all the other Marxist denominations:
The ULEZs fill at least three out of four of these criteria, making it a win/win/win for those intent on stomping over the working class and poor to attain their Marxist Utopia in the clouds!
This was never about pollution, was always about controlling peoples’ movement and restricting peoples’ access to large parts of the city. Notice he still had his pollution spewing limousine.
All part of the 15 minute city idea. He has more security than you can shake a stick at. The car is, of course, bulletproof….
London Mayor Sadiq Khan will have no worries driving around London in his taxpayer funded luxury Range Rover once the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) comes into force – as it will be exempt from the charge.
Khan’s luxury Range Rover has a five-litre engine and is bulletproof with spike-proof tyres and armoured glass
https://iknowallnews.com/world-news/sadiq-khans-luxury-range-rover-is-exempt-from-the-ulez-charge/
It’s the UHEZ – Ultra High Extortion Zone.
Yes
Simples…need to travel around London? Just “borrow” your neighbors plates
It’s not about pollution. It’s about control and virtue signaling at other’s expense.
And keeping the proletariat out of the way of the self-important political class.
And ironically, the NOx and PM2.5 numbers are driven by more stupid government interventions that pushed people in Europe into diesel powered cars as opposed to petrol powered cars which are much cleaner. D’oh!
With DPFs and AdBlue systems that is no longer a real problem.
And the NO2:
Another example of worthless out of control government. Giving government more money isn’t a solution for anything.
Story tip
An Imperial College London study came to the same conclusion 26 years ago. It is available here.
https://edmhdotme.wpcomstaging.com/transport-and-health-in-london/
That was even before the congestion charge in London.
Had the left listened they would have saved a great deal of unnecessary cost and enormous aggravation.